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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: del Rio, Adrian
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.11792
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Table of Contents:
  • It is known that an electric-magnetic duality transformation is a symmetry of the classical source-free Maxwell theory in generic spacetimes. This provides a conserved Noether charge, physically related to the polarization state of the electromagnetic field. We argue that this conservation law fails to hold at the quantum level in presence of a background classical gravitational field with non-trivial dynamics, as determined by the Chern-Pontryagin scalar. This is the spin 1 analog of the chiral anomaly for massless Dirac fermions.